
The goal of marketing for a for-profit business is to increase sales. Marketing without a strategy is a bit like flying a plane with no instruction—your chance of crashing and burning is likely.
50% of small businesses go belly up after five years, and investors believe that this relates to inadequate understanding of marketing strategies from owners.
This article will give you a great understanding of these practices, so keep reading, stay informed, and you will achieve great sales from your marketing efforts!
Understand The Customer Journey
To have a digital marketing sales strategy, you must understand the “buyer’s journey." The customer journey is a fluctuating process that involves these activities:
Becoming aware
Getting interested
Desiring to act
Taking action
Following up with post-actions
Proper marketing escorts the site visitor throughout the journey, guides them, and ultimately closes the sale. As you guide your customer’s through their journey, answer or address these things about your target buyer:
What is their need?
How does your service or product meet that need or solve their problem?
What is the benefit of your product or service?
Why is your company better than the rest?
What steps should they take if interested or if they want to act?
Listed below are guidelines I learned and practice as a skilled content specialist. While you embark on the marketing process, these guidelines help to cover all bases that result in customer conversion and improved profit.
Define Your Target Audience
Discover your ideal and most valuable customers. Create buyer personas that describe:
Demographics
Lifestyles
Psychology, beliefs, and values
Geographics of where they live
As you create your buyer personas, one practice is to consider what your customers are thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing.

Focus groups, surveys, interviews, and following online forums and social media groups will provide you with the information to create these personas. Once created, these customer personas help you appropriately target your ideal customer.
Understand Your Value and Uniqueness
Your customer wants to know your value over other competitors. They also wish to understand how your product or service will meet their needs. Marketers call this your unique selling proposition (USP).
Your USP explains how your product or service benefits the buyer. It expresses how your company is unique within the market and how your products and services are unlike anything they will find elsewhere.
Determine the Usual Platforms of Your Ideal Customers
Conduct surveys and do research to find out where your buyers get information. Learn more about where these customers research products and services. Find out where they communicate with one another about choices and recommendations.
Actively Engage in Email Campaigns
Forbes suggests that the average return of investment of email marketing is around 4,300%. 89% of marketers say that email is their primary method for lead generation.
Email campaigns are great for building customer awareness, keeping loyalty, and allowing customers to stay abreast of your developments. Here are some things to consider:
Only send emails to a target audience versus a broad audience
Fill your emails with useful information
Answer customer questions or solve their problems
Use an actual name in the “from” email address
Address each recipient individually with the actual name of the lead
Use emails as reminders to head to or go back to your site
Include emails about product updates, promotions, sales, and company developments
End emails with a call to action or a question to entice

It also helps to have a variety of templates that you can use based on where your customer is in the buyer journey. Always adjust the templates to make them specific to the individual recipients.
For example, if the recipient has not yet made a commitment or purchase, uses the emails that follow an initial email to provide fresh information and give reasons to look into your company more.
If your recipient is already a customer, use follow-up emails to discuss product or company development. This leads to additional purchases and increased company loyalty.
Use Website Design Strategies to Improve Sales
There are several website tips and techniques to consider for increasing conversion rates and closing sales. Here are just a few:
Build Credibility and Trust
Blog articles and pillar pages show credibility and authority. Without drawing the visitor away from your site, have external links to other credible sources. This reinforces your expertise.
Also, link the data mentioned on your website or blog posts to credible sources. Unfounded or blanket statements cause concern for the reader.
Present Your Product or Service and Court the Buyer
A person visits your website for a solution to a problem. That solution is your business's product or service. Once you determine the needs and interests of your ideal customer escort them to what they need.
Initially, your website audience comprises those just browsing. Some browse to compare companies. Others seek to answer questions about what it is they need or want. Other know what they want, but desire more specifics.
Structure your website navigation to address their needs in a progressive manner. Design to provide increasing amounts of information and details.

Include Pop-Ups and Opt-Ins to Encourage a Customer to Act
Sometimes the initial website pop-ups and opt-ins invite customer to join your email lists. Others allow downloads of more information. Research proves that once a customer commits to give their email, they are further on their way to act.
Provide Clear Calls to Action and Give A Sense of Urgency
Include effective phrases in all online content that cause action of any kind. Such phrases include invites to join mailing list, to download a product description, or to close the sale.
It does not stop there. Offer discounts for initial purchases. Give a time frame for promotions to encourage them to act in a timely manner.
Always give a sense of urgency. Show your buyer that purchasing sooner than later is a benefit. For example, limited offers, seasonal discounts, or limited editions suggest the importance of quick action.
Show Guarantees for Satisfaction
Provide online or website testimonials that show your credibility and authority in the field. Include favorable reviews such as Yelp Reviews. Give customer experience quotes.
Include business accreditations to organizations like the Better Business Bureau or your Chamber of Commerce.
You might also include money-back guarantees.
Make the Purchase Process Clear
Once the buyer is ready to make the sale or sign up for the service, there should be no guesswork about the closing process. For payments, give specific information such as how to provide the credit card or send in a check. Offer several payment options.

Also, inform about what will happen directly after payment or sign up. Tell them how they will receive their receipt, if someone will contact them, and what are the next steps, if any.
Always encourage buyers or customers to return to your company. Once a customer bought something, follow up with an email thanking them for their purchase.
Optimize Your Website
SEO is not the be-all-and-end-all for sales, but proper SEO will surely draw traffic to your website. Once there, and once you have courted the buyer, conversions will happen.
These considerations help to optimize your site and online content:
Improve SEO with the proper use of topics versus just keywords
Do not use keyword stuffing
Involve and track long-tail keywords
Research how to optimize snippets
Use long-form content
Guest post to get backlinks to your site
Optimize user experience as this affects google rankings
Provide content that is more comprehensive than other competitor sites
Continuously generate a lot of content
There is a lot to consider for proper SEO, but optimizing in the right way will pay off.
Only Hire Marketing Professionals Who Strategize
Digital marketing and sales strategies for businesses are complex. Often, companies turn to the help of a marketing professional.
If you outsource for your digital marketing, hire a professional who uses a good sales strategy. An experienced marketing specialist will tailor the planning and strategy specifically for your company.
If you need help, reach out to me. My goal is to help you on your digital marketing journey so you can get your business where you want it to be and, of course, bring in those profits!
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